yeah the way music became synonymous with like “lifestyle” brands is evident of this. it’s so ingrained now that like, the artists or genres you listen to define the way you act and dress or whatever. it’s a confluence of several different industries at once. but this is a pretty recent creation. going back to the way the 60’s counterculture went from something underground to something that a bunch of industries realized they could make huge bank off of. and that looms very large over the music industry to this day. i’ve had convos with people where i’ve tried to like, explain that you can be into music that you don’t immediately like and that was just an alien idea to them. i don’t even know how you even try to sell someone on the value of engaging with music on a more critical level not defined by immediate emotion reaction when that’s just such an accepted belief. i think all those music theory youtube channels are generally kind of annoying but at least they try to do this.
but it is interesting how the music landscape has shattered because of spotify etc where increasingly everything isn’t a celebrity level artist or is someone heavily subsidized by rich parents is “DIY” now. i think the cupboard has been stripped bare in a number of ways. it’s hard to know what the music industry even is anymore because it’s ceased to be a thing that operates at all for most people outside the very top. the music world basically needs to find a way to radically reinvent itself to function as any other purpose, and it hasn’t been able to yet.
i don’t think this is a result of things being “decommodified” or whatever though. everything inevitably gets commodified when it becomes big enough. industries just consistently exploit the desire to be creative because it’s a need many people have that isn’t fulfilled elsewhere in society. and in music especially people are conditioned to think very individualistically and be okay with taking less and less with the chance you might win the lottery. that might be changing though. that is why it has been nice to see stuff like UMAW pop up in recent years, but obviously there’s a very long way to go there.
anyway, just to get this back on topic: this game came out a few weeks ago and i heard from a few people that it’s worth checking out and goes further than the usual Haunted PS1 type stuff.
also did anyone else here post about this game that also came out recently? (okay, i checked and looks like @parker did). looks Hylics-esque, but in a fantasy genre. cool gfx. don’t know how it plays, but probably worth checking out
I probably misspoke in using the word “commodity” and I apologize if so. I agree with you. I see no legitimacy to the concept of ‘intellectual property’.
I’m still not sure we’re disagreeing, but in terms of my outlook, I’d say the ability to make any judgement depends on some violence to meaning. But that I see constraining the space in which a concept exists to a non-specific instance transmissible through techniques or “recipes” as risking severing meaningful context. Context useful in a practical sense, including reincorporation into art practice or daily decision making.
As example, the labor done by low-wage workers in assembly lines, mostly women and people of color, is the reason a concept of ‘pinball’ can exist at all. At an industrial scale they physically put together objects that were then, post-hoc, historically/socially categorized as a form. The line workers’ labor doesn’t have to be considered by pinball designers to be vital, can’t show up in a “recipe”, and is usually a footnote in written histories. Yet without them, there would be no such thing.
I think the people who had the biggest hand in the construction of these machines have equal share to the claim of artist. Similarly, – whether or not the people who are on the line are: enjoying their time, the space they’re in, the safety and sorts of materials they have to handle, and so on, these too are as vital a part of understanding what ‘pinball’ is. The pinball designer may ignore the line workers life entirely, but that’s as much an artistic decision as thinking of how they can contribute to a better labor environment for the line workers.
“I’m going to design this so employees can pretend they’re busy screwing on a part but can actually slack off more” is a (silly) example of how the physical context can guide determinations. Digital media has it’s own layers of obfuscation, but is not removed from these issues either (as comes to the forefront when somebody points out the environmental cost of NFTs or third-world exploitation of ChatGPT or social media admin)
If we think of pinball as a shared, codified, and built upon “technique” that transcends physical specificity, and look at the ways in which that knowledge has been built in things like pinball databases. Those line workers are not listed, their work obfuscated, and existence erased. Maybe without that knowledge we can still assume that open racism was playing a part in pinball design by knowing the history of the United States, labor, that pinball artist Dave Christensen incorporated unambigous nazi dogwhistles in multiple of his illustrations, and so on, and reconstruct an understanding of what isn’t being addressed.
I rather, however, would emphasize that the obfuscated elements of production, from the start, are artists and humans who’s engagement and reception with a piece of art (and the operations required for that) is vital to deciding how we know a form as what it is. And I think that can be generative or helpful as a framework in creation or anything else.
There was reddit thread recently with an unsourced anecdotal comment that it was pretty well known internally that he was a nazi. https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/13urj9/so_was_the_pinball_artist_dave_christensen_a_nazi/
I definitely find Python Anghelo charming…but listening to an interview…and among other things mentioned being friends with Ted Nugent…hard to give the benefit of the doubt for some of his stuff as well
the game just came out and wasn’t even THAT big of a hit. lol. indie games entering their franchise era i guess.
doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be picked up and made into anything tho. i remember when Indie Game The Movie was supposed to spin off into an HBO series and never did.
At this point I feel fairly confident that our ideas are compatible…you’ll have to decide for yourself though of course.
I think that’s a bit more of a specific characterization of “recipe” than I was intending. Like, I see what you’re getting at and I would agree in the sense that you’re framing it, but I would say the recipe you’re talking about in that instance is only one of many in the way that I mean.
The “recipes” I’m talking about can be theoretical, or like “non-constructed” in the mathematical sense—like, there may not be an actual written specification of anything even known, but, you can just say that the recipe must theoretically exist somehow, or probably exists. Any physical object has a presumably-infinite number of implied “recipes” like this, which would be like, ways to arrange some collection of particles into a configuration that a person with such-and-such sensory faculties would be unable to tell apart from the original, and an even larger collection of “imprecise recipes” which produce objects that share some characteristics with the object in question but might be different somehow. These “imprecise recipes” would be approximate, describing a whole class of objects, each of which can be perceptibly distinguished by humans, but which includes the object in question as one possible outcome.
So, the traditional “design for a pinball table,” that is to say like a list of parts, circuit diagrams, blueprints, etc., we can say is one possible “imprecise recipe” for a material pinball table. As you point out, it leaves much unspecified; it probably indicates things like (necessarily approximate) distances between parts and various manufacturing tolerances and notes of what things connect to what others and the like, but to actually construct the table from this requires its own specialized tools, techniques, unique procedures for the table that must be developed, etc. which the “table design” leaves to the “user.” You can say the user must supply another recipe, part 2 you can say, which actually brings the table to completion, and that part has its own artistic impact on the final result. So, yeah, I agree that the people who put the table together are also participating in its construction artistically in vital ways and should be recognized on an equal footing—the table could come out very differently if they changed their procedures after all, and there’s no way to even follow a “table design” without the expertise and manual skills and sensibilities and so on they provide.
To be honest, I raise an eyebrow a bit at the tradition of even making “designer” a seperate, largely aloof type of job from “builder”—like, you would think it would really make to, at the very least, involve the people who will actually be building the table in coming up with its design, at the very least so that they can give input on what design would be the easiest to construct, but also because they might have unique and interesting game design ideas since they handle the physical parts a lot. And like, you would think that anyone who wanted to design a table would also want to understand firsthand how the mass production of it works, because that’s usually the intended application of their (per se) design. The whole division of labor, and how the “building” part is kind of concealed and less glamarous and may pay far worse etc., does seem pretty arbitrary to me and hard to justify.
Like, I do understand in a way why someone might want to design a pinball table “at the level of a game,” like at the level of detail of something that could specifiy both a computer game and a physical table, in the same way that someone might want to compose music for instrumentalists to perform. But, in the classical music world, instrumentalists are on an equal footing with composers in prestige (at least I would say), many people who do one also have strong skills in the other because they greatly compliment each other, and it’s widely considered that both require deep sensitivity and insight and are both their own forms of the highest artistry and so on. Why not the same for the constructors of pinball tables? That might encourage the “designer(s)” just to leave more of the design open and up to them, and I bet that would lead to cooler results honestly. Like, some of the composer-instrumentalist interactions in the work of like John Cage or the Fluxus crowd or the like might be really cool if they were applied to making a physical pinball table, just as a random example. I would also really like to play a pinball table made up as they went by a small team of collaborating builders, like in a free jazz way. I feel like pinball could stand to loosen up a lot generally in terms of process, honestly, now that I’m thinking about it. Like, there are so many other possible approaches beyond those ones too.
I agree 100%.
Hopefully, for all our sakes’!! Yeah, I think an incredibly tragic and infuriating thing about both racism and the undervaluing of certain types of labor (which are often connected, yeah) is how it also leads to large swaths of culture or society being essentially scrubbed from the historical record. Something I think about fairly often on that basis is how like, in 19th-century Georgia and South Carolina, near the coast there were (preexisting and constructed) streams and estuaries running between rice plantations as well as deltas, and these were left relatively unadministered by plantation owners and used mainly for movement and private activity by slave laborers who worked in the fields, both for work (like in an emergency to shore up a certain area against rising water) and on their off time for socializing and informal side work like foraging and the like. There were also slave laborers whom plantation owners picked for house work, and, at least according to the 1850s landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, these slaves had their own social milieu apart from the slaves that worked in the fields and moved around on canoes in the estuaries and so on, and administrators would punish slaves who worked in houses by making them work in the fields and vice versa, because individuals from either group didn’t like to work in the other’s domain.
But…this is a really vague account in a way, and it’s almost certainly too simplistic because it’s practically impossible that all the slaves from one of these spheres felt exactly the same way about, like, anything, probably, since they’re all different people and so on. Some of them probably wished they could do other jobs, right? Plus, they all had time outside of work to socialize, so even if there were sort of “subcultural” differences between those two groups as you might infer from this, probably any individual person in that milieu would have their own feelings about that, and of course they may not have looked so subculturally distinct outside of work as they did to Olmsted, who seems to have interacted with them far more in that context than in any other. Because the primary source material we have about that whole cultural environment is overwhelmingly written by people like Olmsted, though, it’s really hard to follow up on questions like that precisely using historical methods—the enslaved people he was writing about tend to appear in a strongly labor-tinted light, and their lives otherwise tend to appear in vague and removed impressions, whereas fine details about the home lives of plantation administrators are clearly in view. (“Rice, Water, and Power: Landscapes of Domination and Resistance in the Lowcountry, 1790-1880,” Mart A. Stewart, Environmental History Review, Autumn, 1991 (let me know if you want to read this and it being on JSTOR is an issue); The Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmsted, Mason Bros., 1861, pp. 235–237.; I first encountered these documents together in American Environmental History, Louis Warren (ed.), Wiley, Winter, 2003) As before, of course, it’s not hard to think of similar patterns in our society today.
I haven’t heard of David Christensen before but, I’m sad to say, it doesn’t really surprise me to hear that someone from his milieu would be a nazi. The impressions I’ve gotten are that “pulp culture” has had various white supremacist streaks going back many decades/always…not to say that everyone involved in that world has always been a nazi or anything, I know it has its own social fractures and things, it just doesn’t surprise me that some would be.
